N. Ireland Peace Pact Endangered

February 1, 2000|By WARREN HOGE The New York Times

LONDON — Northern Ireland's new power-sharing government could be suspended indefinitely if an imminent report on disarmament does not disclose moves by the Irish Republican Army to scrap its arsenal, Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble said on Monday.

Trimble made the comment against a background of near certainty that the report by Gen. John de Chastelain of Canada, head of an independent disarmament panel, would offer little evidence of IRA willingness to give up its weapons.

The document was delivered to the British and Irish governments, the BBC reported early today, and they were expected to spend some time examining it to see whether there was anything that could be construed as positive before making its contents public.

"If we don't have the actions necessary to maintain confidence in this process, then this process will go into abeyance -- temporarily, I hope," said Trimble, who also is first minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which gained the power to govern Ulster only two months ago.

With the vexing problem of weapons emerging again as an obstacle to political progress, there is a growing likelihood that, in order to forestall a complete collapse of the fragile new government, a coalition of Catholic republican and Protestant unionist parties, Britain will have to reimpose the direct rule from London that it removed in December.

The assembly and other new governmental bodies were established under an April 1998 settlement aimed at ending a conflict between rival Catholic and Protestant paramilitary forces that led to the deaths of more than 3,300 people in the past three decades. Putting the terms of the accord into effect has repeatedly become deadlocked over the issue of disarmament.

Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams has warned that though his party is the political representative of the IRA, it cannot compel the underground army to start turning over its weapons. In response to Trimble's warning, he said that if the government was suspended, the IRA might never agree to disarm.

"It strikes me that it would be very difficult to keep the IRA in there if the institutions were removed," Adams said. IRA representatives have been meeting with de Chastelain in what has been the clandestine organization's first official involvement in the political life of the province.

Adams contended that this development and the fact that the IRA had maintained a cease-fire for more than two years demonstrated its commitment to peace.

But Trimble said a "clear promise" for a start to disarming by now had been given during the review conducted last fall by George Mitchell, the former U.S. senator and mediator of the Northern Ireland peace agreement.

In November, Trimble took the politically bold step of persuading his Ulster Unionist party to drop its "guns before government" insistence that the IRA must begin disarming before the Ulster Unionists would enter government side by side with Sinn Fein. To attract support for his decision to participate in the new power-sharing administration, he said he would resign his leadership of the assembly and his party if there were no disarmament moves by the IRA by February.

"We actually jumped first and took a very substantial risk," Trimble said on Monday. "It's time for other people to be as bold, to take the same sort of risk we did, not to be hiding away."